Anna Antonova

February 13, 2012

Part One: A Map of Sofia

Recently tate and I got to talking about Socialist architecture and metaphor.

My dad is a taciturn man, – sharp, and composed and observant, observant; above all else in the

world, I believe, he appreciates beauty. When traveling, he prefers to walk around and absorb the

atmosphere of the place, whether it is a city or a mountain view. At home, in our apartment, he smokes

on the terrace overlooking the park, and ever since I was old enough to stand, he has called me outside

to show me something beautiful: the moon red-gold behind a cloud, the sky pink or crimson with the

sunset, the violet calm of a morning. When we travel to the seaside every summer, all he cares for is the

view of the water from the balcony of our room. He can sit there for hours, watching the waves.

Soviet architecture, on the other hand, tends to disagree with his aesthetic taste. “The panelki really

are the best example,” he said to me. “It suited those who thought up the system back then: everything

regular, gray, boring, and the people inside also regular, gray, and obedient.” The word he used for

“obedient” is „послушни“ (poslushni), and is usually applied to good children who listen to their

parents. – obedient е достатъчно силно само по себе си, аз лично бих махнал обяснението, още

повече, че послушни деца е позитивен пример, а obedient употребено за граждани е по-скоро

негативно – сиреч те са подчинени, нямат собствено мнение, собствено мислене, те са docile.

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I should explain. Panelki („панелки“) are the signature apartment buildings of the former Soviet

Union, panelki being a slang variation on the diminutive form of the plural for “panel” in Bulgarian.

The individual panelki share the same features and the same appearance. They are usually

predominantly gray. They are pronouncedly rectangular – either much taller than they are long, or

much longer than they are wide. In either case, tThere are multiple vhods („входове“), or entries:

vertical hallways that share the same entrance, staircase, smelly old elevator, and set of problems.

These problems often include poor heat insulation: if you pressed your hand against an old panelka

wall, you would feel the drift of cold air coming through. As a consequence, nowadays people pay for

the installment of additional external insulation – a service companies have increasingly offered since

the rise of capitalism in Bulgaria after 1989. Going through panelki neighborhoods, you can observe

the patchwork of new heat insulation spliced onto the outside walls. It likens the facades to quilts –

against the gray background, there are squares of green, or pink, or blue, or beige, or yellow, or white.

There is usually a different insulation color for each apartment, which lends to both the apartments in

question, and to the buildings on the whole, a surprising amount of individuality. Thereby the many-

colored insulation is an important phenomenon, metaphorically speaking, and we will get to it soon

enough; but it must be said here that it is not that people consciously tried to individualize their space

in this way, at least not in the literal sense. It's just that it tends to be difficult to coordinate with your

fellow vhod-mates on ordering the insulation at the same time so that it wouldn't looked patched-up. No

one gives money readily for a public purpose anymore. – that this is was Socialism, and . if we wanted

Socialism, we would keep our panelki the way they were, would we not? And I will insulate my own

apartment's wall when and if I get to it, thank you very much. The lost model of vhod comradeship,

questionably effective even during Socialism, is slipping away – just like the gray uniformity my father

despises is disappearing under patches of rainbow colors. Both are perceived as inapplicable to the

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democratic and capitalistic type of society post-Socialist society Bulgaria strives to be and build –

democratic and capitalistic.

One longs to say, so are the panelki. They are notoriously cheaply built and badly constructed.

They quickly outlive their value, as the apartments in them must be renovated to maintain their

usefulness. Moreover, their bad quality is nothing compared to their figurative inconsistency with

modern aesthetic and ideological tastes. But for all of that, ignoring the significance of the panelki –

whether in a physical or in a metaphorical sense – is altogether impossible. For better or worse, their

construction transformed Sofia entirely, shaping it into the city I grew up in – the city that in turn

shaped me.

Architecture has an uncanny way of projecting itself into the mind. The more one thinks of

physical structures, the more internalized they seem to become. Bachelard phrases this phenomenon

elegantly in his Poetics of Space: referring to house images, he writes, “they are in us as much as we

are in them”1. For Bachelard, memory and therefore human consciousness are inseparable from space:

“At times, we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the

spaces of the being's stability.”2 Our knowledge of ourselves in the past, that is, is constructed through

our recollections of the places we have inhabited – in fact, he claims it impossible to appreciate the

passage of time in memory without the remembered images of space. Perhaps it is because of this that

instinct refuses to write off the panelki as useless architectural dinosaurs. In some ways, you can sense

their silhouettes mirrored in our thoughts. When you think of the panelki, for instance, the ideology

their commissioners stood for springs up uninvited. My father's immediate recognition of their

metaphorical significance is one example; that of Georgi Danailov, a contemporary Bulgarian author, is

another. “The panel man is damaged,” Danailov writes. “Perhaps irreparably. He got accustomed to 1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. p. xxxiii.

2 Ibid., p. 8.3

living and dying in a concrete dormitory, but nothing good can be expected from such custom. The

malignant consequences are yet to show, and they will affect unsuspecting generations.”3

If the panelki are as fatal a hereditary illness, as Danailov describes them, this is bad news for

Bulgaria. 's measly Of population of 7.4 million, roughly 36% percent of which (2.7 million)4 lives in

panelki. But I think Danailov's sense of how strong their influence is proves a more valuable deduction

than his prediction of their lethality. The 'panel man' is certainly marked by the nature of his dwelling,

but not as simply or as straightforwardly as to say he is either 'damaged' or 'blessed'. As Bachelard

points out, memory folds all the aspects of one's house, positive or negative, into the general image of

'home': “In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in

summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what

syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”5 The panelki are a

strange variation of Bachelard's homely attic. They will never be described as someone's dream home,

but they can be the home that comes up in one's dreams. I grew up in a panelen apartment myself.

When I think about it, I cannot disassociate the sentimentality pertinent to 'home' from the knowledge

of panelki problems. In memory, I find it difficult to ascribe positive or negative value to either. The

vhod bickering seems as excitingly nostalgic as the playground dates with the vhod-mates' kids. My

recollection of childhood is almost entirely dependent on the structure of panelki: skipping steps on my

way down to play, unveiling the mysteries of other apartments in the building, communicating with the

neighboring kids by shouting up and down the balconies. I am forever marked as a panelka child, but if

I am 'damaged' by it, then it is only so as to claim me more strongly for the place I call “home”.

3 Georgi Danailov, A House Beyond the World, p. 24.

4 http://www.dnevnik.bg/zelen/2011/02/22/1048132_saniraneto_na_panelkite_moje_da_spesti_energiina/

5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. p. 10.4

In Italo Calvion's Invisible Cities6, the eternal traveler Marco Polo finds himself again and again in

the image of Venice. But it is no ordinary Venice. It is his Venice, his only home, the one city he seeks:

a place that simultaneously eludes and taunts him through endless mirages of cities, all different, all

representative of the same. And in a similar fashion, the real land of Amber in Roger Zelazny's fantasy

series The Chronicles of Amber7 casts infinite reflections of itself – shadow worlds that only contain as

much of the true source as the oscillations of its presence in the world disperse. Zelazny's characters

ceaselessly fight their way across the shadows to obtain Amber, where they are born, where their hearts

lie. Both Invisible Cities and The Chronicles of Amber present one's home as a prism imprinted in the

soul. You take its image wherever you go, whatever you do, and only ever walk through shadows of it

elsewhere.

Bulgarian folklore has a legend that best expresses this inherent connection between physical space

and the way our hearts inhabit it. The motif is called immuring shadows. Its essence, a haunting,

enchanting concept, is always the same. To build a socially significant construction of stones – a water

fountain, a bridge, a church – the craftsman must make a special kind of sacrifice. He must build into

his masonry the shadow of a human being, usually a young woman, so as to lend the building strength

and relent the ill-disposed forces. In some songs, the sacrificed woman (often the mason's wife or

beloved) is literally immured within the building, buried alive beneath the stones. But even when it is

only her shadow built into the walls, her life is thereafter taken away from her: she “languishes” and

“pines away,” as the great Bulgarian poet Petko Slaveykov wrote8, and her spirit's strength gradually

spills into the stones of the construction until she dies.

It's an ancient, pagan concept, of course. Perhaps it partly served to explain away sicknesses my

6 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili). Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1972.

7 Roger Zelazny, Chronicles of Amber. 1970.

8 Petko R. Slaveykov, “The Spring of the White-Footed (Изворът на белоногата)“. 1873.5

ancestors could not understand or cure. Yet I think the legend is deeply intuitive to the way in which

buildings become more than simple constructions, to the inherent instinct of man to lend his heart to a

place and call it “home.” In the songs and tales where the immuring motif appears, the woman's spirit

always remains with the building, occasionally seen there as a ghost or a talasam („таласъм“, a goblin-

like creature in Bulgarian folklore). Just so, I think, parts of ourselves are left behind at all the places

we have inhabited. Bachelard's wirtes about memory contained within space. The motif of immuring

gets at how souls are contained within space.

In a city like Sofia, memories and old souls alike are laid out for you to see. It is an ancient city,

established at the skirts of Vitosha mountain thousands of years ago, and it is still inhabited by the

traces of all civilizations that have gone through in the meanwhile. Shadows are embedded in the city's

vertical construction like the layered pastry sheets of banitsa. You can look on Socialist architecture as

the uppermost sheet, only topped by the frosting of twenty-first century buildings, and the city's

immured souls can be mapped vertically, as a topography: the y-axis on an xy-graph.

History is piled up from the Roman ruins still in the ground. The earlier heritage – prehistoric

settlements as early as 5000 BC and the Thracian tribes that came after – is not prominent

architecturally; it was too far removed, and those people's building was not permanent enough, for

them to leave a physical urban mark all the way into our city today. But to see the (still quite ancient)

Roman period, all you have to do is peer into the right basement. For instance, there is a the hotel in the

center (“Arena di Serdica”) that incorporates an entire Roman arena into its lobby. As you walk by, you

can look through the first floor window and past the balconies of lower levels, down into the arena's

open excavations on the lowest floor, carefully lighted at key corners to underline its mystique. You can

see the seats around what used to be the stage. You can try to count the individual layers of Roman

stone. You can enjoy it all from where you are, high up on the street sidewalk, as it basks down there in

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the soft yellow glow of hotel sterility.

There are Roman ruins to be found all over the city. are everywhere in the center. Some of them

times, they are already integrated into the urban structure, like , as in in the underpass in front of

thebetween the Party HouseCouncil of Ministers, House of the President and the ex-Communist Party

House. Descending down its the stairs, one feels much more is like entering a history museum than

taking an underpass. a modern art gallery of history. The old Roman walls are only loosely framed only

loosely byonto the modern, polished stone sides of the underpasswalls. They spill out into the

pedestrian space and offer themselves for whatever use you might make of them: touching, climbing,

resting, observing. In one place, a Roman arch constitutes the entrance of a store. The ancient

architecture, hence, has been reordered into the modern context both in a practical sense and as a

gallery object – just as, interestingly, the Soviet-built underpass is reordered into our post-Socialist

context. New businesses populate the old stores. New signs bracket the length of the underpass on each

side. But just as the Roman architecture, the Soviet atmosphere still spills out of its frame and into your

attention.

At other times, the Roman architecture comes up unexpected. In fact, this is what happened to the

arena, which was discovered by accident as they dug for the base of the hotel. Such “accidents” are not

at all uncommon. When I was a little girl, mama once showed me a Roman building that had been

uncovered beneath a major crossroad en route to her work. Where the two boulevards crossed, a wide

square ditch had been dug out. The tramway rails going both ways had been cut, the large canalization

sewer and communication pipes gaped open as in a game of Super Mario. And in that hole, like a

Blossom Tea Flower in a mug, rested a round Roman construction. They had been were digging for

canalization and had stumbled upon one of the ancient city wall towers, wonderfully preserved and

entirely troublesome. Embarrassed, all they could do in the end was secure the thing with some metal

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beams and dig it right back in. It was a major crossroad in the heart of central Sofia: there was simply

nowhere else for all the traffic to go.

The vigilant Bulgar tribe got to Sofia in 809 AD and had the city ever since, except for the two

negligible interruptions by century-long foreign rules. In Bulgarian narrative tradition, these are

referred to as „иго“, igo (“yoke”) or „робство“, robstvo (“slavery”). Technically, the term should be

“rule”: one Byzantine rule (1018-1185) and one Ottoman rule (1393-1878). Whether we like to ignore

them or not, though, both periods left their architectural marks upon our fair city – and sometimes,

especially in the case of religious buildings, these marks were layered on top of each other. Just as with

the famous example of Hagia Sofia in InstanbulIstanbul, many Sofian churches – some of them left

over from the Byzantine period – were transformed into mosques during the Ottoman period. Today,

only one mosque remains in town, not far from the crossroad with the Roman tower, and all of the rest

have been turned back into churches. Metamorphosis of religious buildings can also be described

mathematically, , Actually, since it is only a matter of adding or subtracting variables. Remove an altar

from an Orthodox Christian church, add minarets and appendixes, and you have yourself a mosque.

Reverse the process, and there, you have your Orthodox church back. The church I was baptized in,

„Свети Седмочисленици“ (Sveti Sedmochislenitzi) („Свети Седмочисленици“, “The seven saints”),

was built as a mosque in 15829, but an addition of an altar and an entryway in 1897 transformed it into

the brick-and-stone-walled, graceful church huddled between the willows of its garden today. The site

of the church carries sanctity from ages long past. There was a Roman church there as early as the 5th

century, and even before that, an ancient Greek temple to Asclepius. Perhaps because I was baptized

there, I am often sensitive to the way their religious shadows are built into the church, immured, like

the plaster in between the bricks. Something about the way sunlight beams creep their way through the

dimmed, dignified interior of the church never lets me forget the heavy, ancient sacredness. This

9 <http://www.svsedmochislenitsi.com/>.8

understanding, too, is vertical – but not in the physical sense. It is almost as if, standing under the

church's central dome, I can feel the layers of religious history mapped within my own experience of

the space. As if the immured shadows of martyrs are only keeping company to the piece of my own

soul surrendered to this church the day I was baptized.

If you look carefully enough, I think you can see these spiritual vertical layers also expressed in the

physical y-axis. Spirituality becomes only an aspect of the cultural heritage, which can itself be

perceived through architecture. Buildings from Sofia's past are woven into the city. The Presidency, an

imposing Leviathan built during Socialist times, wraps itself around a Roman round basilica from the

early 4th century. Across the street, the National Archeology Museum rests on top of Roman ruins – you

can admire them up close whenever you eat in the basement of the fancy restaurant – and the museum's

building itself is yet another retired mosque. It presents itself along with other items on the exhibit. Not

far down the boulevard, the old King's Palace was originally an Ottoman cavalry building. All

architecture in the center is like this, morphed and reborn for new functions from its previous

incarnation. Like sacrificed women, individual buildings along with their spiritual significance are

immured into the city's stones. The ancient souls supporting individual constructions, then, are

continuously transferred up the layers of the vertical axis, one age to the next, gathering the memory

and souls of our ancestors into the architecture like an avalanche of time.

Ignorant of the futility, Socialist architecture tried very hard to start anew. In this, it was about as

successful as a rebellious layer of sand clinched between basalt deposits: no matter how drastically

different, still a part of the geologic structure. Within the city context, the Soviet legacy's uniqueness is

precisely what makes it more obviously a historical layer, albeit an alienated one. Socialist architecture

made Sofia into a city of contrasts, endlessly juxtaposing imposing its broad-stroke fronts to the finely

detailed facades of earlier 19th century buildings, clashing its visually squared squares with the uneven

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pavements and rounded corners of old-city piazzas. But they achieved the opposite of what they tried to

do. Accustomed to tracing such contradictions, the eye of a Sofian pedestrian sees them as the parts of a

whole, adjacent pieces to a puzzle.

Тук трябва да те поправя, защото в горния абзац има няколко неточности.

Първо, голяма част от настоящите къщи в центъра на София са построени по соц време и

външният вид на голяма част от тях е заимстван основно от Виена/Будапеща и по малко от

Париж, така че тук определено соцът не може да бъде сочен с пръст като лош пример.

Второ, римските градове са с перпендикулярни улици и големи площади. Комунистите

дефакто извършват ренесанс на този тип градоустройство, тъй като дотогава градовете в

България са се развивали без централно планиране, пораждайки криви улици, които се вият

наляво-надясно, а София не е имала големи, централни булеварди.

Не на последно място, както в САЩ, така и в Западна Европа, следвоенните години са

години на засилена урбанизация, която поради ограниченото място води до височинно

строителство, така че тук комунистическият режим не е някакво изключение.

It is somewhat funny, really, how ironically unaware of the irony Soviet architects were. Yet you

have to concede that their creations do stand out, if even just in size. Socialist construction stretched the

y-axis upwards: before Socialism, the average height of a Sofian building was three to four stories, and

not even the King's Palace rose much higher than the rest. Socialist architecture, though, liked the word

“big.” For example, the panelki can sometimes be twenty or more stories high – a dizzying height if

you grew up on the third floor, as I did.

As I have said, Socialist architecture generally preferred starting from scratch rather than

reclaiming old spaces. It accomplished this not only vertically, claiming the sky, but also horizontally,

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building in areas of town that had not previously been populated. In the 70s, Soviet city-planning even

took the trouble to expand the city center with the construction of NDK, the National Palace of Culture

(„Национален дворец на културата“, Nazionalen Dvoretz na Kulturata). The gigantic complex

created a second focus point for city life, one dominated to this day by the slippery marble of NDK

square.

However, the tendency to conquer new space was not absolute, and it bears one significant

exception. Large parts of the old city center were remastered after World War II bombings left them in

dust and ruins. This reshaping of space is particularly relevant to my family, since my maternal great-

grandfather's house on Kaloyan Street was raised in the bombings along with my great-grandfather in

it. Prababa and dyado Hristo had been out of town when they received the bombings warning, yet

pradyado had stayed in Sofia to work. When prababa came back to where the house had been, all she

found were ruins – and pradyado's “Remington” typewriter, which we still have. I vaguely remember

seeing it at dyado's house on Kozlodui Street.

My family no longer owns the lot on Kaloyan Street. Where pradyado's house used to stand, there

is now a hotel – one of many new structures to replace old Sofia's demolished central streets.

Sometimes, in a strange sort of nostalgia, I go online to look up pictures from the area of pre-war Sofia

I'll never see. I think I would have loved to walk down Market Street, with its wide sidewalks, the

tramway in the middle, and the view to the fountain in front of the King Palace's old gate. There were

buildings in that part of town to rival Vienna, houses designed to break hearts. Which is precisely what

the bombs were aimed at, I suppose. My unfounded longing for these lost streets makes me wonder if

pradyado's death was not in some way an immuring. Perhaps his shadow was built into the dust-and-

bones memory of lost old Sofia, into the image of what the city had been before the war. Or perhaps it

is exactly the reverse, a demuring. Perhaps pradyado's shadow was uprooted from that place and

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escaped, like the shadow of a Bulgarian Peter Pan, smuggled on the inside of pradyado's “Remington”

typewriter.

In the place of pradyado's destroyed neighborhood, the Soviet Party built what we now call the

Largo. It is a complex of several large, stone-proud, imposing buildings, all of them rising higher than

any construction before had dared to. Two of them, the Presidency and the Central Universal Store,

flank what is known as Nezavisimost (“Independence”) Square: two wide lines of a boulevard

separated by a long and wide green patch, where nowadays the city displays the flags of NATO and, in

winter, its biggest Christmas tree. Yet in truth the space was designed to lead your eye straight to the

heart of this astonishing composition of grandeur: the Party House. Your sight cannot help but trace its

facade upward – high stairs to enormous pillars framing floors and floors of windows, to the square

dome and, finally, the thick pillar where the Party Red Star used to stand, higher than everything else.

The star has long since been replaced by the Bulgarian flag, but the building of the Party House stands

just as imposing as ever. While working for tТhe Bulgarian Parliament utilizes the building and during

my internship at the Parliament last summer, I was allowed granted access to this building, which is

still used for governmental purposes by the National Assembly. On the inside, it is grim and grand.

There is something disconcerting about the endless marble hallways, thickly carpeted in red to silence

all nearing steps. Countless sound-muffing doors line up the walls, framed by stylized rectangular

arches, with dim candle-bulbs to throw a hint of light in the way. Windows are scarce in these hallways,

and they always look toward the five-sided inner court locked between the building's wings, a

claustrophobic feeling. The hallways go all the way around – a total distance, allegedly, of three

kilometers. You feel lost within twenty steps.

But then again, this is part of the point. If you create an architectural maze, you control that space.

Only you can navigate it and only you can bestow the knowledge of it to others. I don't actually know if 12

Soviet architects were consciously aware of this notion, but they certainly abused it a lot. For instance,

the NDK complex twists logic along with space. In the front, a subway leads into a second subway,

which then leads into a third subway, where the Subway is located. The NDK itself is as if sewn

together by patches of contradictions. A gigantic imperfect octagon, it somehow manages to be

simultaneously curvy and chunky. Its concert halls are numbered according to their size rather than

their location, so that Hall Two is in the basement, while Hall Three is on the top floor. Throughout the

building, escalators always seem to lead you in the wrong direction, mid-levels spring up unexpected,

bathrooms prove nearly impossible to find. Even an experienced navigator might get lost when out of

practice: only this winter, I got lost on my way to the bathroom during a concert in Hall One.

It is more or less the same with the panelki. Тhey are always found in clusters – artificially

constructed “neighborhoods” with tacky names such as “Mladost” („Младост,“ meaning “youth”) or

“Nadezhda” („Надежда,“ meaning “hope”) – and in their absolute, overwhelming uniformity, these

places somehow warp space. For the uninitiated, panelki neighborhoods can feel like a maze. You

expect the individual buildings to be lined up neatly in a row, or nicely stacked behind each other, like

any sensible building – and they sometimes are, but only sometimes. The rest of the time they ripple

and angle like accordions, line up off-sides, follow the roads around them (or not), or shut off

surprising amounts of space in between each other. Between them you might find playgrounds or

gardens or entire buildings: baba Ana's panelka snakes around in a zig-zagging U-shape and conceals

an entire kindergarten.

In this sense, the panelki neighborhoods reshape even the meaning of Soviet labyrinthine

construction. The torsion claims space for those who can navigate it, because they can navigate it. At

the same time, it presents the lost wanderer with unexpected folds of space, tucked in within secret

corners of the maze. Such gems could belong to any time at all, from playgrounds retaining their 80s

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pristine emptiness to trendy venues like “The Bar at the End of the Universe” (which you can find

either by accident or by being shown to it). Or they could be places associated with a time in your own

life: a set of jungle gyms your granddad took you to, a patch of grass where you once stubbed your toe,

a bench where you played cards with your friends, a set of swings at which you shared a beer with your

best friend from teenage years. The hidden spaces of panelki courtyards is full of possibilities.

In Poetics of Space, Bachelard speaks of “countless alveoli” in which “space contains compressed

time.”10 His image of the “alveoli” is particularly potent for the association with a honeycomb it recalls,

its relish hard to obtain, but somehow sweeter for the effort. In a similar fashion, the panelki mazes are

difficult to navigate, but they are capable of capturing memory and spatial perception alike within their

folds. To an extent, their labyrinthine construction reflects the personality of each pedestrian wandering

around them through what he or she is willing to look for and discover. To me, the familiar panel

neighborhoods feel like home. To my grandmother Vera, an old-city woman, they are a bewildering

mess.

“Someone once explained it to me,” baba Vera says. “'Verche,' they told me, 'you are not meant to

appreciate those neighborhoods from earth. When the Party architects first planned them, they were

looking at their models from above, not from the ground level. Once you are in Heaven, you will be

able to look down on them and understand the logic.'” Baba Vera puts a great measure of sarcasm into

her voice whenever she explains Socialist logic.

But then again my mother's side of the family is very deeply rooted in the city. Mama always takes

pride in the fact that her father's family has lived in Sofia for over a century – long enough, that is, to

witness the same old Sofia that I can sometimes imagine from postcards and crumbling photographs.

And although baba Vera had moved to Sofia late in her life, she had been born and brought up in

Plovdiv, an equally old and cultured city as Bulgaria's second-largest. Like her husband Hristo, baba 10 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. p. 8.

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Vera grew up in an urban house, surrounded by an urban family: her father was a math teacher, her

older sister taught Latin, and baba Vera herself became a doctor. Perhaps because she was so used to

old urban logic, she could never see the sense in places like “Mladost,” which warp her world beyond

comprehension. She came to live in Sofia when it was still old Sofia: after the bombs, but before the

panelki.

That Sofia was, excepting the Largo, exactly the same quaint little capital as before the war. It was

a city barely over half a century into its promotion from mud-street, donkey-cart town. After our

Liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878, when it became capital of the Third Bulgarian State, Sofia was

only a small disorganized city of twelve thousand people, with crooked unpaved streets11. In fact, it was

so provincial-looking a capital at the turn of the 19th century that Zahari Stoyanov – the first and

arguably most famous of Bulgarian chroniclers – wrote of it in disgust: “This damned Sofia is muddy

and far from civilized Paris and classical London, and has nothing in common with those centers.”12

Naturally, newly minced King Batenberg had a healthy interest in altering that condition. The 1881

“Batenberg plan” for the city's development – promptly executed – outlined a compact, orderly capital.

Toward the end of the century, Batenberg's successor, King Ferdinand, acquired glazed yellow paving-

stones from Vienna for the central streets and boulevards so that they would not be muddy anymore.

But for me, that old Sofia is now merely the center, the core, the beginning. The city dimensions

from the early 20th century – Batenberg's Sofia, ending at the Lion Bridge on one side and the Eagle

Bridge on the other – frame all of the Sofia dyado Hristo was born in, but it barely constitutes half of

the Sofia I grew up in. Not only did the city spill across from the Eagle Bridge, it also spilled over it.

The bridge is now much wider than it used to be. Its old balustrade, stretching between the four pillars

that bear the titular metal eagles, no longer serves as railing. Instead, it adorns the wide sidewalk on 11 The Stara Sofia project, <http://stara-sofia.com/sledosv.html>.

12 Zahari Stoyanov, Znaesh li ti koi sme?, p. 274.15

one side of the road and forms a pedestrian island on the other.

The shock of such special change can only truly be understood visually: it seems impossible to

express it in words. It is, I suppose, somewhat similar to walking down Wall Street in Manhattan and

realizing that it used to be the wall, where New York ended.

I think it must be just as difficult for my family to relate to this dramatic change in scope. Still,

their experience of the city's horizontal expansion is as divergent as is the family itself.

Baba Vera has an anecdotal story about the 4th kilometer that shows depicting just how distant

panelki neighborhoods feel to her – physically and otherwise. “The 4th kilometer” is a busy stop

halfway between the Eagle Bridge and “Mladost,” one I used to pass by every day on my forty minute

commute to school in the morning, an integral part of Sofia today. Yet before “Mladost” was built,

there were only a few military detachedment buildings at that spot (understandably stationed outside of

the city) and several apartment buildings on the other side of the road, for the military personnel who

worked there. It was where the city ended and the road for the airport forked off. Baba Vera's friend

was the wife of someone who did indeed work at the 4th kilometerthere; she lived in those apartment

buildings. The story goes like this: she wakes up one morning and tells her children, “Oh, look kids,

look what a fog there is in Sofia this morning!” The kids, young and silly with pride, say, “Are we not

in Sofia, mom?” And she responds, “No, no, kids, we are not.”

On my father's side, neither baba Ana nor dyado Dancho were born or raised in Sofia. Dyado

Dancho, a military man, spent much of his career traveling throughout the country, bringing his family

along with him. When they finally came to Sofia in the 70s, they were rewarded by the state for his

dedicated service with an apartment in the new and upcoming neighborhood of “Mladost” 3. Baba Ana

and dyado Dancho had no problem with whatever ideology panelki may have symbolized. In one of my

16

earliest memories of baba Ana, I asked her whether she belonged to the “blue” or the “red” party, with

the innocent understanding of a child that only sees two sides to the matter. It must have been the early

90s. I remember baba sighing. “We are communists, sweetheart,” she said. Back then, I was not

familiar with the word or its connotations. And by the time I was old enough to start comprehending,

baba Ana made a point of being extremely quiet about whatever understandings she had. – тоя абзац

нещо няма смисъл за мене. Нито първото изречение има връзка с останалата част от текста, нито

целия цитат има връзка с текста преди или след него. Или го преработи, или го махни.

It really is quite interesting that tate, who grew up navigating the panelki neighborhoods, rejects

their aesthetic so vehemently. In a way, I suspect it might be equal parts rebellion against his parents

and the ideology they supported, one to which he did not subscribe. But my father is not the actively

rebellious type. Whatever he believed, he still spent his entire career worked for a national security

branch of the government, a position so secretive that even after the regime change we still were not

allowed to know what it was exactly that he did. Publicly, tate, as almost everybody else, never raised

his voice against the system. But his is the subtle revolution of artistic understanding that most

Bulgarians quietly retorted to, protest expressed through secret aesthetics. It was a common coping

mechanism.

Over dinner last summer,, my favorite high school teaching coupleteachers, Ivaylo Dimitrov and

Zornitza Semkova, speak spoke about the thrill of importing illegal Western music, like the Beatles.

“The more forbidden it was,” Mr. Dimitrov says, “the more it became a political action to obtain it.,”

and they proceed to tell me about the They tell me about the improvised John Lennon memorial started

on the Notary’s wall (the Notary is a building where all the notaries resided back then) wall in the

center, started after his death in late 1980. The first night vigil with candles was dispersed by the

militia. But aAlthough several students were arrested and expelled from their schools, others would still

17

sneak to the Notary's wall where they had first gathered and to dedicate their graffiti to John Lennon.

“There would always be new writings appearing,” Ms Semkova tells me. “You would scribble

something quickly and run to avoid the militia.” To listen to that music was the same as to approach the

space of that wall: a symbolical revolt. After dinner, Mr Dimitrov and Ms Semkova take me to the

Notary, just down the street from where we have been eating in the centerate, and show me the wall.

There are no writings on it to John Lennon now, of course, twenty-one years and counting after the

Change. “This is where it used to be,” Mr Dimitrov says. There are no John Lennon writings now, of

course. Instead, there are posters for Deep Purple and AC/DC – the very bands the Communist regime

used to ban. In passingAs they pass, they quickly put their hands against the wall as if to a prayer stone.

They point to where the writings used to be, and the reflections of memory dance through their eyes.

The obituaries now posted on the wall share sacred memory.

“It might not have been intended as a metaphor,” tate said of the panelki. “But in practice it really

was one.” The official explanation behind panels was, of course, that it was fast: according to my

father, it only took a month to put together an entire apartment building. Even so – perhaps even more

so – the metaphor stands. Fast, colorless, mass-oriented: no place for detail or craftsmanship, no time

for quality or artistic expression. “Uniform” meant “currently efficient”: anything different was simply

too difficult to deal with.

The panelki were not the only metaphor enforcers, however; there was also the concept of

“standard projects” as they were called. They were a number of pre-designed and pre-approved models

for buildings that people could and would borrow for their own projects. If you wanted a house, you

were best off resorting to a “standard,” even though it might mean you would have the same house as

each of your neighbors and, often enough, the entire town. Perhaps, if you were a good enough Party

member, you could also have a “Model Home” sign on your front door to distinguish you from the 18

rest.Some, who took extra care of their house or garden, were awarded with “Model Home” award,

which they proudly hung at the front door. But that is hardly enough to make you stand out.

If you wanted something different, mama said, “you made it really quite hard on the clerks.” For

most people, this alone was discouraging enough. My mother's family, however, was somewhat more

stubborn. For our villa in the skirts of the city, baba had beautiful non-standard blueprints, which

outlined – and eventually resulted in – an artistic and original little house. But at the time, baba Vera

was bluntly told: “Dr. Dimcheva, if it were not you submitting it (for she was a well-known and

respected doctor with some influence and connections), it would have been straight to the trash with

that project.”

Of course, even if somehow you managed to get your project in orderapproved, there still was the

small matter of finding building your materials, – which were scarce at best. A quick explanation is

perhaps needed. Even though Bulgaria was industrialized and having healthy output, the Communist

regime exported most of the production to Western countries, using in return the foreign currency to

repay the Soviet Union for the goods and raw materials it imported from there. That left little for

domestic consumption, hence the scarcity of goods.

“I remember how happy I was after military service – somewhere around 1975 – when they started

producing modulate furniture (the prints for which, your mother reckons, they outright stole from

Ikea). They were made out of dark wood and could become anything at all (това e „ставаха за нещо“

преведено директно ли?)... and they were an incredible innovation at the time.” Though I have no

memory of itthe said time, we used to have a piece of my father's old modular furniture at home: even

in the very early 90s, it was the best kind of furniture to haveve. The white tiles in We also had white

tiles in our hallway also have a with their own adventure story. Because materials were so rare back

then, you had could only buy to wait for something, if it was to be “let out” in the stores: one day

19

available, the next day gone, the news of it available through gossip, or if stumble upon it by chance

only. Mama's tile discovery happened on her way back from work one day: “I saw them in this store

and liked them – never mind the quality, you had no choice those days – but the owner salesman did

not know if they would have them by the morning. So I raced home, took the car, raced back, loaded all

these tiles by myself in it – there had was been no time to call anyone for help – and then lugged them,

again by myself, all three flights of stairs up to the apartment. Later I had a specialist look at them, but

even when he said “You know, their quality is really bad,” I did not care at all. I had solved my tile

problem. You took what you could find, always.”

Quality goods were only produced for special occasions... and fiction. Mama worked at the only

Institute for Furniture in Sofia, a furniture factory with own design house, where, she says, their chief

work main occupation was to create the so-called “folders.” They were projects that nobody would ever

use, for the most part – projects completed merely to have something to do. At times, they also worked

on special orders – for Party houses, Party rest hotels, Party member residences – orders that, unlike

most others, were actually completed. Or, sometimes, they made projects for exhibitions. “You would

create, for example, a set of beautiful, modern furniture; but it would only be produced in a series of ten

or so, to be presented at the fair and show the people – and the world – that we were actually producing

something... although of course we weren't.” The produced sets would be then bought by friends or

relatives of the factory's director; for the rest of the year, the factoryies kept spitting out their it’s usual

uniform produce. It did not matter how hard you tried and how much you hoped that this time your

creation will make it to the stores and the people – you knew, and were invariably proven right, that

this was impossible.

In a sentence, mama sums up the feeling such projects produced in her, the passionate interior

designer: “It was like attempting to write an incredible masterpiece with only fifty words... and using a

20

pencil.”

Although tThere is now a sense in which, now, the penciled sketch reshapes itself into a multi-

colored artwork. Space becomes redrawn, remapped, reimagined. The surprising, unexpected

individualism of apartment buildings is only one example, one my mother herself could easily

recognize. For years, she complained about the set-up of our own apartment, until finally, a year or so

ago, she renovated it entirely, switching the places of the kitchen and my bedroom, expanding the

bathroom at the expense of a useless hallway, switching the doors of rooms to different walls. She

reappropriated that space for herself, for us, and made it our own in a way that it hadn't been before,

although it had been our own all along and still is: it is our own in our time, now.

And in precisely the same way, originality has spontaneously grown onto the walls of the panelki –

тук може да се поспори дали това е оригиналност или кич; в Германия нямаш право на промени

по жилището без това да одобрено от съвета и градовете им изгледат доста по-приятно от

нашите. Окото, така учи теорията на дизайна, е спокойно когато вижда консистентност и се

смущава когато липсва хармония, а панелките на кръпки са точно такава липса на хармония, да

не говорим какъв кич е блок в 16 цвята . This happens in quite a few different ways. If you live in

a panel apartment, you want to change the frames of your windows – wood to aluminum to whatever

the latest hit in window technology might be. You would also, often, assimilate your balcony into your

living space; partially or entirely, whichever you would rather, with as many windows as you would

like, spaced out as you prefer, shaded by blinds or curtains or nothing. And in result, no apartment

building is now uniform.

Тук прехода е окей

But nothing reflects the process of reimagining Soviet architecture quite like the fates of Soviet

monuments. One of Sofia's most disputed objects, for example, is the Soviet Army monument, which

21

became quite famous only last summer for its brief and sudden remake.

The story feels somewhat like a Carrollean dream. One morning in June, the city awoke to a new

image of the familiar old place. For its long decades of existence, the monument has looked, more or

less, the same. A tall central pillar crowned by the figures of a triumphant soldier, a jubilant worker

woman, and a child; four corner panels at the foot facing all four directions of the garden it inhabits.

For those regretting Socialist monuments, it has been a troubling presence: the garden it stands in is

quite a central one; it once used to be the city zoo and even though it would have been a claustrophobic

zoo indeed, it made a better use of space than the Soviet Army monument, which takes up most of it

today-- except with a different sort of display. Първо, било е парк, второ, бил царския парк и е бил

затворен за обикновени посетители, така че цялото това вайкане за „градинката“ е малко смешен

плач.

One of the side panels of the monument displays a composition of brave Soviet soldiers fighting –

who knows what. And that night in June, someone had repainted it through the night, adding colors to

the lifeless bronze figures, reclothing them in new roles: as American and capitalist comic and popular

culture heroes. replacing the old ones.

It was now Superman holding the flag in the middle; and the flag, of course, was now American.

There was Santa dressed in a red-and-white parka; Ronald McDonald lurking behind Superman's

shoulder, the Joker smiling from behind his rifle to the left, Wonder Woman pushing at the back of

Captain America. Under the panel, you could read a message in all caps: “IN STEP WITH THE

TIMES,” to show you that the artist was really quite aware of his own ironical message. In fact, it was

quite clearly a well thought-out operation: despite it being drawn in darkness, all the details were

perfectly executed and accordingly placed. The only bearded soldier had become Santa; the only

woman – Wonder Woman; each hero's paraphernalia was depicted with a remarkable precision.

22

We have a phrase in Bulgarian that says “every wonder for three days”: that is, every sensation gets

old in a couple of days. It generally seems to be a truthful proverb; but the new image of the Soviet

Army monument was never given the chance to become boring. Barely a week after it was created, it

was cleaned in the exact same manner: in secrecy through the night. Except this time, it was official.

Sofia Municipality simply preferred not to face the crowds of protesters.

The significances and ironies of this story are piled up in several layers. The artwork itself:

laughing at our old fake heroes as well as the new ones; equating the supposedly opposed concepts of

capitalism and communism as mere trends we blindly worship; chastising equally those who still cling

to the old days and those who try too hard to embrace the new, with each group looking down on the

other; playing on the problematic of the monument itself, of its place within the city. The reaction:

amplifying a debate that had been going on for twenty years without achieving anything; pointing out

the ineffectiveness of public discussion within such a divided population. And the clean-up: secret

politics that had nothing to do with the people and everything to do with foreign sensitivity.

“Here is another metaphor,” tate suggests, “the story of your school.”

My school is the American College of Sofia. It began as a missionary American institution in

Plovdiv (my grandmother Vera's hometown – then called Phillipopolis) at the beginning of the 1860s,

before Bulgaria's period under Ottoman rule was over. Later, it expanded in Stara Zagora, moved

altogether to Samokov, and finally found its place in Sofia during the 1930s13. After World War II,

however, when the American teachers were ordered to leave the country, the school stopped operating

as an American teaching institution. Instead, during the years of Socialism, the buildings and territory

were used for police academytraining by the Bulgarian State Police... in which capacity my father

studied there himself.

13 http://www.acs.bg/Home/About_ACS/History.aspx 23

The old buildings were all the same during that time – but they had different names, and there were

different subjects taught there. In addition, the State Police added in a few buildings of its own, which

are still there and still used as the State police school. After the Changeregime fell, however, most of

the old buildings were given back to the reopened American College of Sofia, where I studied.

A metaphor of change, an example of policy. There was no such thing as a private property during

Socialism: everything belonged to the State and was leased out to citizens under conditions. It was the

same with our villa. The land had used to belong to a sanitary my grandmother Vera worked with; but it

had been desolate and undeveloped, so the woman asked my grandmother whether she might like to

use it. The owner's permission, of course, had been a mere formality – it was actually the local Council

that decided how to distribute the land; and it was only through connections and a lot of luck that my

grandmother received permission to build.

“Still,” mama said, “the land was not technically ours, only the building. I paid for that land after

the Change regime fell quite dearly – both my mother's share and my own as a heir to my father. And I

paid at market price. We might have had the villa for twenty years, but we only own the land now.”

And then, of course, there is the story of our apartment's “procuring.”

Back in those days, your a family was only allowed a certain amount of space: a one-room

apartment for two members, a two-room apartment for three members, and so forth; if you already

owned a house, like my mother's three-person family, you were not eligible to obtain a new dwelling. It

just so happened, however, that my grandfather's firm company – he was an engineer – was building an

apartment building for its workers, one that a colleague of my grandfather's had reserved an apartment

for himself in. When it came time to pay, however, the colleague in question did not have the means to

purchase the apartment; so he offered to give over the right to my grandfather if he could supply the

money.

24

They had some money saved; but there was still the problem of not being eligible. “An uncle of my

father's,” mama said, “found me a note saying I was “in need,” as it was called. It was a fake; I do not

know how he found it. But the apartment was bought, and in my name; and that is how we acquired it.”

“My parents could not have bought it in their name,” she concluded. “They would have had to get

divorced to have two separate dwellings. And you know, many people did divorce on paper, back in

those days... just so they can keep their homes.”

It is August of 1999 now, and they are detonating Georgi Dimitrov's Mausoleum in the center,, or

trying to. The first big blast has been mostly ineffective. It turns out that the Mausoleum, built in 1948

to contain the body of Bulgaria's “chieftain and teacher” Georgi Dimitrov (the first Communist leader),

has been secretly reinforced in 1978 to allow the building to function as a nuclear bomb shelter. And so

it is almost as if that first detonation in 1999 hesitated, thorn between ravenous opinions tugging at it

on both sides, and remained stuck in between. This building, detested and adored, has been a

mandatory site of homage for generations of Bulgarians: no procession, holiday, or visit to the capital

before 1989 could go without a sanctioned kiss on the mummy's hand. The mummy itself has been

moved as early as 1990, but its Mausoleum has stayed – a cold white cube against the sunny golden

facade of the old King's Palace on the opposite side of Batenberg square, the even gray concrete of its

bedding clashing with the topography of the square's yellow paving stones. It has stayed – a magical

stage for Aida in a warm summer night of my childhood, when a procession of soldiers on horses rides

in carrying torches and I want to stay and watch the last act, but mama won't let me because I'll get

cold.

It is August of 1999 now, and tate and I stand together on one side of Batenberg square, peering

from a safe distance at the Mausoleum's white cube. The disappointing first blast has only taken out a

lick of the building's side, so that it looks like it's squatting, like a lop-eared dog sitting there with head 25

cocked, waiting for its master to arrive. But of course there is no master coming. Tate and I have only

come to take a last peak: by the end of the day, the Mausoleum would be gone forever.

Even I can feel the strangeness. I sense the bittersweet feeling of something about to be lost but not

really missed, like that old dress I never wore but still stomped my foot for when mama made me throw

it away. The sense carries in the slow August air as if it were dust.

But what does tate feel? His entire youth was defined by the regime he now sees destroyed in its

ultimate metaphor. His aesthetic taste must rejoice despite the nostalgia that prompted him to come and

take a last look at this tasteless block of concrete propaganda. What is it like for him to stand there?

What does he feel?

Does he utter a parting word? Does he share a piece of pent-up wisdom with his little daughter,

born almost a decade ago in the night before yet another important structure of concrete fell? Does he

at least reflect on the pertinence of the metaphor? What does he say, my sharp and composed and

observant father?

He says, “Let's go, Ani. I've looked enough – a glance was all I needed.”

26